A Better Path to the SMB for Asterisk

This ISPCON announcement shows how an acquisition and a change to an existing product will help ISPs sell Asterisk-based services to small business customers.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 17, 2007]

San Diego, Calif.-based Asterisk specialist Switchvox had some impressive news for the first day of ISPCON, a new product aimed at helping ISPs sell voice to small business, but the company had even bigger news at the end of September, so let's backtrack for a moment.

On September 27, 2007, at ASTRICON, the company announced that it had been acquired by Huntsville, Ala.-based Digium, the commercial arm of the Asterisk project. Tristan Degenhardt, who until recently was vice president of operations at Switchvox, is now director of marketing for Digium, a change she is pleased with.

But why would an open source company acquire a proprietary one? Degenhardt explained that although the Switchvox solution will remain proprietary, some of the solutions Switchvox developed will be used as templates for code that will become part of the open source Asterisk project. The code will be different but it will solve the same problem.

Another reason Digium wanted Asterisk is because the GUI that Switchvox makes is helping sell Asterisk to small business customers. "It takes a certain kind of nerd to get Asterisk to work," admitted Degenhardt. "You shouldn't have to muck around with conf files."

Switchvox has always been focused on small business. "Our products are named SOHO and SMB," she noted.

The switch to unified communications opens a larger potential market for Asterisk.

But would she put Asterisk to work with Microsoft products? "Yes, we would potentially work with Microsoft products."

The business switchboard
The idea is to enable the software to work with anything a business is using. Degenhardt provided us with a mockup sample of what her personal computer might look like during a work day.

It shows a list of employees at Switchvox, and the details of any call they're handling. If Degenhardt receives a call, it will show the location of the caller's phone on Google maps and also perform a Google search on the caller ID, which is usually the company's name.

"I know a lot about someone before I pick up the phone," she said.

She noted that for cell phones, the Google map will show where the phone is registered rather than where the person is now, but she said that can work well too. "I recently got a call from a guy who was in Boston but his cell phone was registered in Florida, so I was prepared to answer Florida-related questions about hurricanes and power and emergency backup when I picked up the phone."

And if you saw a call from a high value account going to a poor agent? "I might steal the call."

The system allows a manager to listen in to a call, record a call, whisper (talk only to the sales agent), or take the call before the agent answers it.

The other reason Digium made the acquisition has to do with Switchvox's ISPCON announcement.

A hosted system
Switchvox has made a key improvement to its hosted VoIP system for ISPs, which runs on Linux and uses Xen for virtualization. The company needed to address a key barrier to sales, explained Degenhardt.

Every small business plans on being big. So while small businesses were willing to pay $40 per person per month for hosted communications when they had three people, they knew it would no longer make sense if they reached three hundred, because at that point they could buy several Switchvox boxes.

So the company has enabled what its press release calls, "the world's first full-transferable hosted IP PBX platform." When an SMB customer that has been using the hosted service is ready to buy a box, the install is simply ported to the box in just a few clicks.

The world is connected, and the phone system should be too
"We think that the old model, with a monolithic phone system that doesn't talk to anything else is just weird in the IP age," said Degenhardt.

The potential for further innovation is all about connecting the phone system to more applications. She can connect Switchvox to SalesForce.com and SugarCRM, and could connect it to other information in the future.

"Everybody has an API," she said, "even FedEx."

— End